"He left that place and set out for the territory of Tyre. There he went into a house and did not want anyone to know he was there, but he could not go unrecognized. A woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard about him straightaway and came and fell at his feet. Now the woman was a pagan, by birth a Syrophoenician, and she begged him to cast the devil out of her daughter. And he said to her, 'The children should be fed first, because it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the house dogs.' But she spoke up: 'Ah yes sir,' she replied, 'but the house dogs under the table can eat the children’s scraps.' And he said, 'For saying this you may go home happy: the devil has gone out of your daughter.' So she went off to her home and found the child lying on the bed and the devil gone."

(Mark 7:24-30)

I read this and I think of Jesus, what an asshole! Were he not the Son of God (however one defines that), we would not be afraid to call him a racist pig or worse. Indeed, Jesus' comparison of the Syro-Phoenecians to dogs is a racial slur. Biblical-era Jews regarded the Gentiles as unclean. Jesus was Jewish, and indeed some theologians believe his mission was solely to the children of Israel. This is one of the less pleasant passages of the Bible, what my chaplain euphemistically calls a "challenging" or "difficult" passage.

However, Edwina Gateley, a Catholic minister to street people and prostitutes in Chicago, offers us another interpretation: that this unnamed woman's "stark and indignant honesty" "stretched Jesus to a deeper understanding of his call to be inclusive." Jesus was said to be fully human as well as fully divine (and some theologians reject his divinity). Well, to be human is to have prejudices, blind spots, people you don't like. At some point, Jesus would have woken up on the wrong side of the bed and chewed someone out. At some point, he would have got whiny over some minor problem. Jesus too was rude to his parents or forgot someone's birthday.

And, in fact, this Jesus is a better Son of God for us than a perfect Jesus. If the Son of God could have prejudices, that is a message to us. Too often we go, "I'm not a racist, but..." We cannot be wilfully blind to our own prejudices. We must acknowledge that we have prejudices, and that, every so often, God makes us meet someone who will challenge them. I pray that people on both sides of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion will open their hearts and minds to this possibility.